The Devil on Your Back
by atrialbyfire
Summary: There's a reason Elena's prints appeared on that stake.  Rated M for possible future chapters . A Tatia Petrova story.  Elitia & Klatia
1. Chapter 1

DISCLAIMER: I do not own the vampire diaries or any of it's characters.

Once upon a time, that was how fairytales were supposed to start, four small words that led an eager captive audience into the thrill of the unknown. Beauty, adventure, and love. The perfect genetic makeup for a happily ever after. Or so one would think.

You see, _once upon a time_, there'd been a girl named Tatia. Like any modern day heroine she'd been both intelligent and beautiful, and every man had wanted her. Some had been dashing, some strong, but none had been quite as memorizing as the Mikaelsen boys, Elijah and Niklaus. Each had easily drawn her in, neither being like the other. Elijah was quaint, sophisticated, kind. Niklaus on the other hand was rash, destructive, and vulnerable, and both hopelessly in love.

As if entirely unaware of each other, or the blood that ran between them, both boys vied for her affections in a way that had stirred conflict into the very heart of their family. Threats had been ushered, punishments delivered, until the Original witch could see no other solution but one, death. And this is where the story alters drastically, as vividly and macabre as any Grimm novel. From her bed Esther had snatched her, dragging her by her hair into the forest where she'd cut, and hacked, and _sacrificed_ for her children, and there she'd left the girl raggedy and dying as she calmly walked bowls of her blood back to her transitioning children.

Esther could have never suspected that Tatia would have survived, nor that her own spell would have cast itself not only over her children, but the village in itself. What a surprise she would have suffered had she known, but who could have ever? Since it was a quickly waning spell, no one else was effected so long as they lived through the night - only Tatia didn't, and therefore she became as much a victim to Esther and Mikael's plotting as the rest of them. Falling beneath the pain of her wounds, Tatia died, unknowingly, for her loves, and woke hours later to a burning in her throat only a passing forest animal could sate.

Days had become weeks, weeks had become months, and then before long centuries had dredged past. Not quite the happily ever after she'd been set up for. Restricted to the waning hours of day and the darkness that followed, Tatia travelled for hundreds of years without purpose - that was, at least, until a little bird perched on her shoulder and whispered of a creature named Elena.

Unfortunately for Tatia, she'd missed Katherine's episode entirely, caught up in Russia at the time. However ,as soon as she heard of this doppleganger she fled from her current whereabouts in Washington and made for the city of Mystic Falls, where she was greeted by the presence of too many supernatural beings and a council set on killing them all, including Niklaus. That's how it had come to this. She was poised over a body against a wall, long legs keeping her hovered above a body who's chest cavity was split by a knife. Her curls fell over her shoulders effortlessly, framing the gentle angles of her face as she stared down at him, the vampire hunter. Alaric. He was still breathing, but each intake was shallower than the last, and she wondered how many seconds would tick away before the blood had clogged his throat past the point where he could no longer breathe.

"The power must be out." Her head snapped up as a boy's voice resonated through the house, drawing her out of her trance. That's when she heard her voice, _her_ voice - but it came from somebody else, and a part of her longed to rush down and snap the neck of who had taken her own identity from her. Only she couldn't, no, that would interrupt things, and Tatia was nothing if not precise in her calculations and planning. Katherine had no doubted inherited her unique gift of survival from her. No, she'd wait, until the opportunity announced itself. Until then she'd let them fumble about in the dark, unknowingly searching for something, _someone_, they didn't even know to exist.

As they stomped up the stairs, their footsteps leaden and so undeniably human, the Petrova original slipped back into the shadows she'd become so accustomed too, before seeming to vanish entirely.

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><p>SO, chapter one, not quite as long as I wanted it to be - but I just wanted to give a brief intro into everything before I actually set into the story, at which point I'll be looking to add more in-depth flashbacks and the like. Please review (:<p> 


	2. Chapter 2

The old woman that called the Bed & Breakfast her own greeted Tatia like an old friend as she strode in, shuffling after the leggy woman with slack purpose and dead eyes. Katherine had left her brutalized but still charming, and Tatia found it almost amusing the way her and her doppleganger's style seemed to coincide as she sauntered up the short staircase to the second floor. She closed the door on the woman's face and hollow questions as she slipped into her room, nothing but a suitcase in a chair marking it for her own. She was tired, and blood stained her clothes like battle wounds. She shed them easily from her skin, the material dropping away, carelessly, to the ground before she slipped in between the sheets of her bed, at which point she quickly allowed sleep to carry her thoughts away to some place far away from here.

She awoke in the morning to a buzz in the air, excited whispers seemed to weasel their way through the cracks in her window. "_They're throwing a ball," _the voices urged, lively girly giggles that drew her upright in bed, rooting deeply within her conscience. "_The Mikaelsen's." _came another informative laugh, and Tatia ran a hand through her hair, ignorant to the way her chest grew to heave with labored and anxious breaths, a subconscious and overwhelmed reaction to the news. Dragging herself out of bed in full, she pulled a robe around herself, and quickly walked over to the window, looking out. It was a group of girls, no older than she appeared to be. A part of her longed to go out and ask for more information, but their bodies were slowly waning from sight, leaving her with only her room and few belongings to keep her company.

Turning back to the empty comforts of her room, she allowed her gaze to trail her surroundings as if looking for something. Though her gaze had awoken empty and cold, her eyes seemed to soften as she walked over to the open luggage she'd ignored the night before, her hands pulling from the depths of the bag a worn image of a man who's sketched face had long ago bled into the parchment on which it was drawn. Fingers trailed comfortingly over the chiseled cheek, remembering.

_"Are you almost finished?" Klaus turned his head to admire her, the way she hunched over her paper, charcoal in hand._

_"Stop moving," she laughed, reaching out to push his face back into how she'd framed him earlier, the look almost contemplative, aristocratic._

_He fought rolling his eyes and held his face just so, trying to avoid a squint as the sun caught his hair, setting it aglow. All the while his fingers twirled around blades of grass in his hands, twisting the strands, braiding them about to create some unrecognizable piece of jewelry._

_"Finished," she finally announced, setting aside the ashen stone, soft lips puckering to blow cooling air across the drying ink._

_"Well now what will you do with it?" Klaus turned back to her, a grin tilting the corners of his lips. It was cute, that devious look of his, and she had to wonder if he was scheming something as a means of payback for her tireless efforts to keep him still and silent for most of the day._

_"Keep it forever, of course."_

"Forever," she mused aloud, to herself, as she continued to hold the picture in her hands. "I've finally found you, my Niklaus..." her voice trailed off into soft, effortless vowels as she settled the picture back amongst her things, however tempted she was to fold it up against her chest and hold it there, as if the very memory of it would warm the cold that had held her for centuries.

Despite how small the world was for a creature such as she, it'd been an everlasting struggle trying to find the man who'd died and dined on her blood. Esther and Mikael had taken their children far from her and anybody - everybody. They had always been an overbearing bunch, and now that they kept the supernatural in tow they were sure to be even more on their guard, and thus she was left wondering and wandering.

However, Tatia had been a step behind them, a stutter in the shadows of their past. Once they'd closed themselves off from the world entirely, her efforts in finding them had seemed to hit a stand still. She'd been whole heartedly lost, unsure where to even begin to locate somebody who didn't want to be found. She knew Niklaus well, but who knew what decades had done.

It was at this point she'd focused, instead, on another target - the doppleganger, the girl who would lure Klaus in as effortlessly as Tatia herself once had. She was no fool, Tatia, she knew what the curse entailed. That was the benefit of having been the sacrifice upon which the spell had come to exist She'd been right, but now that she was here, how was she supposed to announce herself? How was she too confront a man she'd loved so long ago with the fact that she'd been alive all this time, just out of reach?

"Theophilia," her voice rang out, through the door, beckoning the mentally imprisoned into her room. The old woman appeared almost instantly, her eyes still hazed over with compulsion, her body in moderate ruins from the amount of times she'd been fed upon by doppleganger and original alike, "Where's the nearest boutique?" she asked as soon as she turned to face her, to which the woman answered immediately, informing her that there were a few nice shops in town, but that the more daring, and of course expensive, could be found in the next city over.

"Why, miss Tatia?" the woman asked curiously after the fact, voice polite, quaint, proper - she would have done well living in a different time, in a different place.

"I need to buy a dress."

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><p>I'm slowly starting to piece together a history for her, I don't want to write it all out like a novel though, so expect me to put it together bit by bit, and again sorry this is a tad short - expect them to get longer once I have more than just Tatia to write (:<p> 


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